The Next Big Thing Blog Hop
The Next Big Thing Blog Hop is a viral campaign to help
bring awareness to writers and their works in progress and hopefully guide new
fans to their work.
My friend Linda McCabe answered these same ten questions about her forthcoming
novel
Fate of the Saracen Knight:
volume two in the Bradamante and
Ruggiero series Read Linda’s
responses at: http://lcmccabe.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-next-big-thing-blog-hop.html
And she tagged me for this week.
But I’m “it” this week, so here goes:
1) What is the working title of your book?
Beautiful Lies
It is the
first book in my Pinot Noir Murder
Mystery Series A series of “stand alone” mystery novels that takes place in
California wine country.
2) Where did the idea
for the book come from?
I read a
lot.
I read
constantly.
When I read
a book I never skip the back of the dust jacket, end notes, footnotes,
introductions, authors’ bios, and review blurbs. I once read a blurb on the
back flap of a Raymond Chandler novel that said something like, “Other mystery
writers concern themselves with crime, Raymond Chandler writes about sin.” That was the germ. I wanted to write a book
(set in the wine country of Sonoma County, CA)
that concerned itself with primal and elemental sin.
3) What genre does
your book come under?
Murder mystery.
4) Which actors would you chose to play your
characters in a movie rendition?
The sexy nineteen year old
female stripper/heroine addict/Sunday
School teacher would have been a
perfect role for Jack Klugman or Ernest Borgnine, but unfortunately they both
died last year.
I jest, of
course.
This
question disturbs me because it assumes that a book ain’t shit until Hollywood
deems to eviscerate and elevate it to the screen. This is particularly disturbing
because it is true. Cool Hand Luke by
Donn Pearce, Red Sky at Morning by
Richard Bradford, The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter
Tevis, Ironweed by William Kennedy, Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo and more
recently Generation Kill by Evan
Wright, Searching for Bobby Fischer by
Josh Waitzkin, and Tenderness by
Robert Cormier: all of these great books were brought to my attention because
they were made into movies that I saw first, then sought out the books.
But I digress:
Beautiful Lies’ Bridget
Elmore would be played by Diane Lane:
but the sexy, self-centered Diane Lane
of Unfaithful. Bridget is a capable
and formidable businesswoman who grew up poor and never wants to revisit
poverty at any cost.
Bridget’s husband Darren Elmore would be played by Daniel
Craig, but not the stiff-comic-book-James Bond Daniel Craig, but rather his
freewheeling, dangerous character in Layer
Cake. Darren is the book’s catalyst: while drinking one night he decides he
wants to kill someone, just to see what it feels like. So he does.
The Elmore’s nemesis, Colin Moseley, would be played by Matt
Bomer from t.v,’s White Collar.
Young, hungry, and ruthless he knows some facts that he could use to steal
their winery and vineyards.
Sheriff Frank Hernandez would be played by David Zayas who
is Angel on Dexter. Tough, fair, believable—,
but not 100% honest.
(Note: unfortunately,
Beautiful Lies doesn’t have a sexy
nineteen year old female stripper/heroine addict/Sunday
School teacher. Sorry, it just
seemed funny about 247 words ago. Perhaps in my next book...)
5) What is the
one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A rich and
indulgent Sonoma County
winemaker wants to experience the emotional thrill of getting away with murder;
and he does: until a surprise blackmailer from his past arrives.
6) Is your book
self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an
agent?
Beautiful Lies will be published by Bubba Caxton Books, in March
2013. This is my third novel for Bubba Caxton Books. The other two are Tantric Zoo: A Bud Warhol Mystery and Teenaged Pussies From Outer Space: A Love
Story.
7) How long did it
take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Too long.
Way too
long, but with good reason.
I wanted
the first draft finished last March (2012) and the book done and published,
hopefully, by July or September. But I have a little problem with skin cancer
and my chemo just kicked my ass last year. I don’t know if it is a cumulative
effect from years of using it, but the side effects were devastating in 2012. I
was in a stupor for months. I couldn’t concentrate. I was stupid. I couldn’t
understand blonde jokes. I considered getting a Rush Limbaugh bumper stickler
and joining the Tea Party. Anyway, it
was all I could do to get through work and exercise a couple of times a week. I
slept a ton: nap naps naps. I walked a lot and since I couldn’t focus enough to
write I re-read and took notes on my two favorite writers, Ross Thomas and
William Trevor. (I also re-read The Iliad
and most of Canterbury Tales.
Wow, I love those books.) I also wrote in a journal fairly copiously, mainly:
“I feel like shit and can’t stay awake or concentrate enough to write, this really
sucks ass, poor me, boo-hoo, waa-waa, and so on and so forth....” You know: the
good, solid, unadulterated self-pity that journals record and rationalize as
growth and insight.
It was
weird, I was seventy pages into Beautiful
Lies and working from a typed forty-five page outline: I really had my plot
nailed, but I just sat at the keyboard and drifted: I’d been mentally short-circuited.
So I fucked around at the computer and pretended I was working on my book (I
did knock out a few short stories and several articles) but it was all I could
do to get through the day, read and nap some, and bang out a shift at work.
So in late-November
(cooler weather, less busy at work, nasty chemicals cleared from my system, who
knows?) I started feeling well again and I started BOMBING in Beautiful Lies and, to help me along, I
bought a new laptop (so I could write somewhere other than my office) but in
the course of installing Word and transferring files I lost about forty pages
of Beautiful Lies. I tried rebuilding/rescuing
files and going back to set points on my old computer and all that geeky
wizardry but nothing worked: the forty pages were history. And I hadn’t printed
it out. (I told you I had become Tea Party stupid.) And, as much as I’d like to
blame my computer it was my own dumb ass fault.
So I
screamed, loudly.
Once.
Then I got
back to writing by recreating the lost pages from memory as quickly as possible.
To my surprise, I think they came out better, much better, than my original
effort. But in retrospect that makes sense: I’d had time to internally edit,
and I wrote in a steady concentrated fervor so as not to lose anything.
I finished
the first draft of Beautiful Lies in early
January 2013 (better late than never) and immediately printed it out and began
editing/rewrite/salvage operations. It’s probably my cleanest ever first draft
because I rewrote the lost forty pages from memory, and because I had to re-read
the book on my many abortive attempts to continue, so the first ten chapters (112
pages) were actually re-re-re-rewritten and pretty clean grammatically. Another
plus to having been chemically short-circuited is that I had time to hone the
second part of my outline and I pared away a lot of fun and funny stuff (from
the writer’s POV) that would have, ultimately, been a distraction to the reader,
and a detriment to the book’s focus and final form.
So, once I
got rolling it took me, probably about six or seven weeks to produce a first
draft. But it took me sixteen or seventeen months to find enough consecutive lucid
days to write properly. But I re-learned a most important lesson: “ALWAYS PRINT
OUT YOUR WORK.”
This is great
advice to fellow writers.
That, and: “Try
Not To Get Cancer.”
8) What other books
would you compare this story to within your genre?
The Killer Within Me by Jim Thompson
The Truth About Bebe Donge by Georges
Simenon
9) Who or what
inspired you to write this book?
The three
main characters in Beautiful Lies are
vindictive and flawed and petty and dangerous and they were inspired by my fellow
workers at the Farmhouse Inn and all the nuns and priests who taught me at St.
Vincent’s high school...
Just
kidding.
I can’t pin
it down that clear and clean and simple. It’s a novel. I really just made up a
lot of shit and wrote it down. The closest I could come to a source of
inspiration is that Sin/Crime dichotomy I mentioned above. I wanted it to be
primal, not petty.
10) What else about
your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Fun facts about winemaking and
some pretty hot and sweaty sex.
Rob Loughran’s other books (in paperback, ebook, and
audiobook formats):
High Steaks
Tantric Zoo
Teenaged Pussies From Outer Space: A
Love Story
The Smartest Kid in Petaluma
A Man Walks Into a Bar...A Compendium of
Filthy, Uncouth, Lewd, Lusty, and Lascivious Jokes
The Official “I Hate Women Jokebook”
Things I Wish I Did NOT Know About
Writing: 15 Essays on Dreams, Sorrows, and Proofreading
Who Cares If George W. Bush Destroys the
Free World: This Guy is Funny!
Grandma Hazel’s Funny, Funny Kidz
Jokebook
The Official Blonde Jokebook
The Official X-Rated Animal Jokebook
The Official Nasty & Blasphemous Religious
Jokebook
The Official Love and Marriage Jokebook
The Official Doctor and Lawyer Jokebook
The Official Obscene Old Age Jokebook
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